There has been a lot on the news lately about stalking and cyber bullying. I have experienced cyber bullying first hand and I know how horrible it feels to have people emailing you and even contacting you on social networks and it isn’t pleasant. Luckily my incident stopped with time and a lot of patience. Many people aren’t so lucky and the bullying can spread to other methods especially with newer formats of Facebook where your mobile telephone number is stored on your page. From my research I have found that many cases of cyber bullying progress to physical encounters or stalking.
A very close friend of mine is a victim of this practice. It initially started with an individual hacking into her Facebook and Hotmail accounts but has progressed to telephone harassment and even her being attacked in a park on her way home from work. Now the hacking was fairly basic, emailing friends and family abusive messages claiming to be my friend and writing slanderous comments on her Facebook page, but it progressed to this person calling her nonstop and leaving abusive voicemail messages. A few months ago she was attacked in a park but managed to get away, police thought these incidents were unrelated and then the online/telephone bully admitted being involved in the attack. How could they have had knowledge of the attack considering my friend had told no-one other than the police at the time of the incident? How can this be considered unrelated incidents?
More recently the hacking has continued and posts on her Facebook have become worse. From simple status updates along the lines of “I’m an evil C**t and you should all delete me” to “I’m going to upload pictures to show you what I’m really like” and even “you guys aren’t taking me seriously maybe a firebomb would do the trick”. Naturally her friends have been defending her on all of these accusations and the picture never emerged so it was clearly a bluff but in my opinion the final threat should be taken seriously, even if it is like the others an empty threat.
What I think is the worst factor in this case is that the bully is clearly someone that she knows from university as they have given enough information in the threats/emails/updates to prove this. This means that it is likely that her friends (myself included) know this person who will not admit who they are. Yet we are still helpless as to stop them. Some of our friends have even suggested that perhaps my friend is the one behind this. I can vouch for the fact that it is not her as she has been with me on one hacking occasion and had no access to her Facebook. So please someone tell me how she could have been the one writing the derogatory statements and accusations on her Facebook when she physically could not get online and I was present to prove this?
Naturally my friend’s state of mind is deteriorating rapidly and she is clearly depressed about what is happening and also terrified that these threats may come to something. After all she’s already been attacked by someone (escaping with bruising). I honestly feel that the new laws on stalking and harassment cannot come in soon enough. The police need more power in cases involving social networks etc so they can intervene before things get this bad. I am terrified of what my normally bubbly and outgoing friend has become and I fear for her health.
If you’re reading this and you know someone who has been in these situations please help them, don’t turn a blind eye to hacking and cyber bullying etc. It can get so much worse.
Having had friends in a situation where they were bullied it's important to secure their online presence as quickly as possible.For us this was working out which parts of her online life were compromised, which shared passwords with those then systematically resetting them all and changing security questions from a different device than her normal one.
ReplyDeleteAfter that you need to secure the device, it could be keylogged or hit with some other malware - although I expect social engineering is more often the culprint, I remember once tricking a friend into giving me the answer to their security question by using one of the 'Oh this is how you get your rockstar name! Name of your first pet and your mothers maiden name!'.
Key to taking back control is to secure accounts and devices, you may be able to get an IP address from a login - some email accounts will offer you something like that in the settings 'Last log in was from XYZ IP' and you can use that to sometimes narrow down the area the person is from - just an indicator that may confirm/deny any suspicions.
my friend (the victim) works in media and computer stuff etc and shes done that, facebook in particular has a gaping black hole in which you can say i know longer use this email address and you can then get passwords etc sent to a different account. the hotmail hacking appears to have stopped for the time being at least thanks to changing information. I know how easy it is to work out passwords and secret answers etc, you just have to know the person to get it!
ReplyDeletePoor form from Facebook!
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the post I'll make sure to help as much as I can if I come across a friend suffering anything similar.